Simulating the precision glass molding process

Over the past two decades, precision glass molding has gradually become a competitive hot-replicating manufacturing technology for precision glass optical components. But form errors occur on surface of molded glass optics as a result of a diverse range of effects including viscoelastic relaxation and thermal shrinkage of optical glass material during the molding and cooling processes. Conventionally these errors can be compensated solely via time-consuming and cost-intensive try-out molding experiments.